 The Feast of the Goat is only the second of Vargas Llosa 's novels to be set outside Peru ( the first being The War of the End of the World ) . It is also unusual because it is the first to have a female protagonist : as critic Lynn Walford writes of the leading character in The Feast of the Goat , and also Vargas Llosa 's subsequent book The Way to Paradise ,  both are utterly unlike any of the other female characters in his previous novels  . The novel examines the dictatorial regime of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina in the Dominican Republic . Trujillo was , in historian Eric Roorda 's words , a towering influence in Dominican and Caribbean history  who presided overone of the most durable regimes of the twentieth century  during the thirty @-@ one years between his seizure of power in 1930 and his assassination in 1961 . Trujillo had trained with the United States Marine Corps during the United States occupation of the island , and graduated from the Haina Military Academy in 1921 . After the U.S. departed in 1924 , he became head of the Dominican National Police which , under his command , was transformed into the Dominican National Army and Trujillo 's personal virtually autonomous power base  . Trujillo was officially dictator only from 1930 to 1938 , and from 1942 to 1952 , but remained in effective power throughout the entire period . Though his regime was broadly nationalist , Daniel Chirot comments that he had  no particular ideology  and that his economic and social policies were basically progressive . The novel 's title is taken from the popular Dominican merengue Mataron al chivo ( They Killed the Goat  ) , which refers to Trujillo 's assassination on May 30 , 1961 . Merengue is a style of music created by Ñico Lora in the 1920s and actively promoted by Trujillo himself ; it is now considered the country 's national music . Cultural critics Julie Sellers and Stephen Ropp comment about this particular merengue that , by envisaging the dictator as an animal who could be turned into a stew ( as frequently happened with goats struck down on the Dominican Republic 's highways ) , the song gave those performing , listening to and dancing to this merengue a sense of control over him and over themselves that they had not experienced for over three decades . Vargas Llosa quotes the lyrics to Mataron al chivo at the beginning of the novel . fill in the blank  : Trujillo was officially dictator only from 1930 to 1938 , and from 1942 to _____ 